1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to accessing, organizing, and/or interacting with information, and more specifically to systems, methods, and computer implemented products for providing nestable user interfaces that enable extensible capabilities for accessing, organizing, and/or interacting with visual representation of data on a computer display.
2. Related Art
As information technology (IT) has become an ubiquitous facet of modern life, new challenges arise. In prior eras, merely gaining access to information has been a principal factor that has influenced many individuals' and organizations' capabilities. At various times, the mere possession of information has been a major avenue to the acquisition of power. Currently, and in particular with the ever increasing capacity and reach of large volume data transfer capabilities, it is not so much the naked access to information that is as critical as is the ability to organize and manage the glut of raw information that is available. Locating the appropriate information from amongst the vast breadth available has become so difficult, and the addressing of this issue has concomitantly become so valuable that great wealth has been earned purely from presenting the best present means to effect a search on the Internet. Additionally, as IT has assumed a paramount role in many IT user activities, these users' personal data storage has also become so convoluted that tools are needed to more effectively organize this personal data. The prevalent present approaches are primarily based on paradigms that model storage systems from previous eras, such as file cabinets. Many current user interface designs organize items in a file type architecture, where items reside in locations based on type of file or software used to manipulate it. Examples of these include conventional email inboxes, contacts folders, “My Documents” folders, “My Video” folders, shared network resources, and browser favorites. These paradigms are of some benefit, but also have substantial limitations due to their inability to provide substantially variable organization configuration capabilities, and their involved structures that can greatly slow locating and/or compiling diverse forms of information.
Primarily, the software tools that have been previously made available for users to access, organize, and/or interact with the panoply of information sources have been designed by software engineers who are focused on accomplishing new functionalities and advances in software design from the perspective of a designer, not a user. While this trend has been at least partially reversed in recent years, the legacy of many prior IT design choices have become as ingrained into the common user's experience as has the qwerty keyboard layout design, irrespective of the concomitant compromises or design flaws inherent within these legacy technologies. Advances in technology, from improvements in processing capabilities to advances in communication pipeline bandwidth capacities, have both provided new functionalities as well as established new problems. Advances in software design have generally focused on utilizing to the fullest extent the potentials of these new capabilities, to the point where advances in hardware performance have been balanced (or surpassed) by advances in software technical demands. Hence, the user experience often does not improve, or may even degrade even with the expansions in potential functionalities, since the learning required to fully capitalize on these advances is frequently a greater obstacle than the absence of these functionalities. Rarely are the ease and intuitiveness of use of the IT tool considered to be a first priority of the designer, except for certain notable exceptions that are celebrated successes due in particular to their focus on the user experience first and foremost.
The ever expanding bandwidths of modern communication links, and of data storage capacities also present their own opportunities and challenges. It is virtually undeniable that access to more information is an advance, and yet it is far harder to find a particular piece of information and/or organize a group of information when the pieces of information number in the millions or billions, than when they number in the hundreds or even thousands. Perception and cognition research has identified varying ways in which humans more naturally recognize and/or locate information than the standard manners in which information is generally presented and/or organized by the majority of IT resources. For example, a human will generally identify a specific item from among a large group of items more readily when that item is identified with a known image than when that item is identified with a textual label. Accordingly, it is desirable to develop software tools that will provide an IT user with more efficacious ways to access, organize, and/or interact with information.